Identification of wood in gunstocks

[mkeen]

    
identification of wood in gunstocks

Quote from: scooter on March 18, 2010, 10:47:45 PM
To determine if American or European, you can send a piece of wood, about 2 X size of a toothpick to Wood ID Group /US Forest Service/ Gifford Pinchot Dr/ University of Wisconsin, Madison [don't know the zip]. You can send a reasonable number of samples per year, maybe 10, no charge [your tax $$$ at work]. All I ever ask for is what kind of wood & North American or European. I'm with those who believe ultimately it will be shown to be European. That said, many early guns are product of European craftsmen who came over & have not done a la St Paul "when in Rome" etc.


The Center for Wood Anatomy Research will try to identify what species of wood was used in the making of a gunstock. From what I know they cannot determine where it was grown. If the gunstock is made of English walnut (Juglans regia), that does not mean it was made in Europe. The colonists brought all sorts of trees and seeds with them during the earliest attempts to colonize America. If anyone has tried to shell the nuts of the native walnuts, black (Juglans nigra) or butternut (Juglans cinerea), you know they would have  tried to start growing English walnuts almost immediately. By 1700 there could have been plenty of English walnut wood available in the colonies for gunstocks. Under the right conditions walnut trees can grow rapidly. The date of introduction for English walnut to America is unknown but it is thought to be at least by the mid-1600's.

M. Keen

[JV Puleo]

The problem is even greater in the opposite direction... huge amounts of American timber were exported, especially to England. The entire premise of the mercantilist system was based on the export of manufactured goods from the mother country and the import of raw materials from the colonies. The British were importing Iron ore from Maryland and Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. If there was a profit in iron ore, there certainly was in timber. In the late 18th - early 19th centuries there was a  fad among the top end London makers for stocking guns in birds-eye and striped maple. A friend of mine has a lovely pair of Griffin duelers stocked in tiger-maple that no one would call "American."

By the middle of the 18th century (and maybe a lot earlier too) there was hardly a walnut tree in England that could be cut down for wood, but America was loaded with the stuff... probably one of the reasons all the Ordnance gun stocking shops were on the Thames waterfront. The significance of American / European" wood has been overblown for years.

Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) works well in northern Europe but it is based on compiled information from known dateable sites and I understand that there is no equivalent North American data base... not surprising because we have so few dateable sites that go back past the early 18th century.

[jwh1947]

Thank you Mr. Puleo.  Wood went back and forth across the pond with regularity.

[flintriflesmith]

...
Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) works well in northern Europe but it is based on compiled information from known dateable sites and I understand that there is no equivalent North American data base... not surprising because we have so few dateable sites that go back past the early 18th century.

A wood technology professor at VA Tech was one of the leaders in gathering data for dendrochronology in this country and he was brought in by Colonial Williamsburg to look at some of the original building where documentation alone did not give a construction date. There are several points of confusion about the process that he explained during his work here.
First, the data has to be local. It looks at annual ring width and droughts, the most common cause of a poor growth year, can be very regional. Even in the same local area there can be micro climates.
 Second, it only determines when that part of the tree being matched to the database was growing--the wood near the center of a large maple was growing well over a century before the outer rings. That means a rifle stocked from a tree cut in 1840 could be made of wood that grew in 1740. When dendrochronology is applied to dating it is used where the timber being examined has an exterior surface that was the last year of growth before the tree was cut—the year right under the bark.
Those two factors alone make it virtually useless for dating gun stocks with any degree of useful precision.
Gary

[JV Puleo]

Those are very good points that I hadn't even thought of. A few years ago the late Henk Visser paid for the restoration of a group of very early Dutch pistols in a Russian museum. Since there were a whole group of them, all similar and from the very part of europe where the best dendrochronology data base exists, it was thought interesting to try dating the stocks. Most of them proved to date from very close to the estimated date of the pistols - not particularly surprising. One of them was completely off the map... with a date of something like 1260! The conclusion was that it was stocked from a reused timber (these were munition-grade pistols) but, from what you suggest, it could also have come from the core of a very big and old tree. It gives a good example of how far off these "scientific" methods can be if we don't keep appraised of their shortcomings.